Pretty furious, p.1
Pretty Furious, page 1
Dutton Books
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024
Copyright © 2024 by E. K. Johnston
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Dutton is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Penguin colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Books Limited.
Visit us online at PenguinRandomHouse.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9781984816146
Cover art © 2023 by Lauren Mortimer
Cover design by Maria Fazio
Design by Anna Booth, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
pid_prh_6.3_146710365_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Characters
Prologue
Sixth Wish
First Wish: Property Damage (or: Maddie’s 17th Birthday)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Second Wish: Slander (or: Jenny’s 17th Birthday)
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Third Wish: Utterance (or: Mags Sharpe’s 17th Birthday)
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Fourth Wish: Vandalism (or: Louise Jantzi’s 18th Birthday)
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Fifth Wish: Blackmail (or: Jen Dalrymple’s 18th Birthday)
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Sixth Wish: Arson (or: Maddie Carter’s 18th Birthday)
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
A Letter to the Editor
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_146710365_
To Colleen, Erin, Krista, Leanne, Sandra, Sarah, and Siobhan.
Obviously.
“I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne: Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.”
—Dr. Henry Jones Sr.
Characters
The Carter Family
Maddie Carter (June 11)
Janice Carter, mother
Peter Carter, father
Emily Carter, older sister
The Sharpe Family
Mags Sharpe (November 14)
Mary Sharpe (née Shropshall), mother
Theo Sharpe, father
David Sharpe, younger brother
Colin Sharpe, younger brother
Elsie Sharpe, younger sister
Clara Sharpe, younger sister
Frederick (Teddy) Sharpe, younger brother
Father David Shropshall, uncle
David Shropshall Sr., grandfather
Magdalen Shropshall, grandmother
The Jantzi Family
Louise Jantzi (January 27)
Julie Jantzi, mother
Hugh Jantzi, father
Aaron Jantzi, older brother
Paul Jantzi, younger brother
The Hoernig Family
Jenny Hoernig (August 25)
Julia Hoernig, mother
Adah Hoernig, younger sibling
Char Hoernig, younger sibling
Dottie Hoernig, younger sibling
The Dalrymple Family
Jen Dalrymple (May 1)
Lisa Dalrymple, mother
John Dalrymple, father
Others
Amelia Chaser, older local girl
Isobel Johnson, volleyball player
Elizabeth Stewart, grade 11 student (Mags’s second cousin)
Dahlia Hastings, grade 12 student (Jen has a crush on her)
Peter Hastings, Dahlia’s grandfather (David Sr.’s roommate)
Zac Hastings, Dahlia’s brother
Constable Jake Postma, local cop
Reverend Alden, local Anglican minister
Adam Pedersen, local asshole
Margaret and Jan Pedersen, his parents
Davy MacGregor, a boy from Mags’s church
Alice MacGregor, a competitive swimmer
Trevor Harrow, a boy from school
Elyse Ritsma, Isobel’s cousin
Emily Postma, Jake’s younger sister
Mr. Harrow, principal and later superintendent
Mrs. Fiske, current principal
Mrs. Heskie, music/French teacher
Mrs. Kelly, guidance counsellor
Mr. Kelly, phys ed/algebra teacher
Mr. Rogman, science teacher
Mrs. Miller, drafting/geography teacher
Mrs. Bowles, English teacher
Mr. Attis, history teacher
Mr. Carmichael, phys ed teacher
Mr. Kreskin, janitor
It occurred to me, at that exact moment, that I didn’t know very much about bird watching.
“It’s usually just called birding, Maddie,” Constable Postma said.
He was standing well back from my car, the very picture of nonthreatening. Except that we were in the middle of nowhere, and he’d pulled up to ask what I was doing. He did not suspect that I was in the middle of a stakeout, because why would I be doing something like that?
“Whatever,” I said. I held up my binoculars so he could see them. “I’m learning. I just want to be alone.”
“Can’t you be alone in your room like a normal kid?” he asked. It took him about two seconds to visibly regret his word choice.
“No,” I said.
“Is everything okay at home, Maddie?” he asked. His tone didn’t change, but he shifted slightly, entirely becoming the sort of cop people naturally fear instead of the affably concerned neighbour he usually tried to project.
“Sometimes I just want to be alone.” I went easy on him. He’d had a rough few weeks, and it was my fault. Not that he knew that part.
“I understand,” he said. “That’s why I took up birding.”
I glared at him, but he was trying to be “accessible to the community,” so his laugh wasn’t too scornful. He walked over to his squad car, and I watched him closely as he rummaged through the glove compartment. After a moment, he came back towards me carrying something. It was a little book.
Birds of Ontario.
“As long as it keeps you out of trouble,” he said, passing me the guide.
I thanked him because that’s how girls are supposed to talk to cops. Then he got in his car and crunched away through the gravel lot, leaving me alone again.
I held my binoculars in one hand and the book in the other, and then threw them both onto the passenger seat. I went back to looking across the bean field, listening to the wind as it rustled through the browning leaves.
Trouble was exactly what I was looking for.
Sixth Wish
(Two Months Earlier)
It hadn’t been anyone’s business but hers that Amelia Chaser was pregnant, but in a town like Eganston, that didn’t matter very much. The same neighbourliness that saw ladies in the grocery store ask about her health had them clicking their tongues the moment she was out of earshot, cooing about how they didn’t like “all these new people” in town, like property values were the only thing that mattered. “You’re such a good girl, Maddie Carter,” they’d say, making it clear that it was a precarious scale that only slid one way. I hated it.
Amelia Chaser, to her credit, didn’t fucking care. She wasn’t going to be a farmer’s wife—or a mother—at eighteen. She sat through a patronizing guidance counsellor appointment about her new university plans given her “developing circumstances,” and was confessed by Father Shropshall, who apparently forgot that it takes two to tango. Then she got in the car with her sister, drove to London, and had an abortion. The next Sunday, Adam Pedersen, who wasn’t going to be a father after all, was given Communion, like nothing had changed. Amelia made Father Shropshall deny her to her face. I was very proud of her.
It’s not that Amelia and I were close. We’d never attended the same school, because she was Catholic, and she was older than I was. We’d overlapped in Girl Guides and curling, but not enough to know each other by more than small-town proximity. Amelia’s rebellion happened to coincide with the moment I realized other girls—different girls—were people and not the enemy, and I was angry about how all the people who we were supposed to trust had betrayed her. I was angry that I might have betrayed her, too, if it had taken me longer to wake up.
The billboard went up a year later, the Monday before my eighteenth birthday, and it had festered in me all week. The Pedersens had fifty acres, most of it cleared for farming, and chose to set the sign up so that it faced the Chaser farmhouse. They weren’t subtle. After two days of tractors getting stuck in the late spring mud, their revenge for Amelia killing their grandcells was revealed:
Abortion Stops A Beating Heart.
It was stupid, and it was pointlessly cruel. And it was all I could think about.
The Sunday after the sign went up, two of the five of us were parked by the cenotaph, engine off and the windows down. We were waiting for Mags Sharpe, whose parents were Catholic enough that they went to church every week, but not so much that they wanted to send their kids to a school system whose funding had been sanctioned by the UN. Mags had been in youth group with Amelia, and she was our primary source for information that hadn’t been three steps through the rumour mill. When she slid into Jen Dalrymple’s back seat, Mags was positively humming with emotion. It was the first time Amelia had been back in town since she left for school last fall.
“At least she got to go away for university,” Jen said when Mags was done bringing us up to speed. Father Shropshall had actually tried to give her Communion this time, but she’d refused him. Jen’s mum’s car made alarming noises when it crossed 100 kph, so we couldn’t speed that much. When we were out of town, she put it in cruise as a preventative measure. “It sucks how quickly the boy next door becomes the asshole who ruined your life.”
“I think she’s doing fine,” Mags said. “I couldn’t see her face when she refused my uncle, but Davy MacGregor was the altar boy this week, so he could see her face, and he looked like he was going to piss himself.”
Davy played broomball at the provincial level.
“I just hate how everyone talks about it,” Jen said. She slowed to make the turn off the highway and onto the sideroad. “Like it’s all her fault she’s—”
Unfixable. Irredeemable. Untouchable. Take your pick. At least Amelia was past the sugar stage, and was well into the spice of not giving a shit.
“Let’s not talk about it,” Mags said. She leaned on the car door, the wind whipping strands out of her French braid. “It’s Maddie’s birthday. You only turn eighteen once.”
I didn’t correct her by pointing out that my birthday had been last Friday, or that I actually did want to talk about it. It was just the three of us in the car. What I wanted to talk about was going to need all five, and the others knew it. Mags wasn’t the only one humming. We’d been working our way up to this for a while. The last year—and the previous four birthdays—had been a lot, but it hadn’t been enough.
You have to fight to make it through life with four best friends. You can’t all fit in the same car—though we could now that most of us could drive—unless we used Mags’s family behemoth, and every time a teacher assigned partner work, you had to negotiate. Our elementary school had only had about three dozen kids per grade, and our high school wasn’t much bigger, but it was never a sure thing we’d end up in the same classes. Geography and time and money and interests will pull you apart, but somehow we’d made it to the beginning of June with the end of grade twelve in reach, and we were going strong. Maddie and Mags and Jen and Louise and Jenny (who would probably be a Jen by now, were it not for a snap decision made by our nursery school teacher).
We spent most of our time at Louise Jantzi’s house. Her parents had sold their dairy quota instead of modernizing it when we were in grade eight, on the grounds that they didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives with a cow deciding whether they could go on vacation. The farm and all its buildings had been converted into something of a mishmash that Hugh Jantzi refused to call a “hobby farm,” and one of the conversions had resulted in a rumpus room that wasn’t attached to the house. They rented it (and barn space, as necessary) to the local 4-H club. It was wired and heated, had a refrigerator, a TV, and comfy seats, and was well out of earshot of any adult. Mags’s basement definitely had better bathrooms, but Mags’s basement was also available to the horde of younger Sharpe siblings, so we only went there on special occasions.
Eganston was the centre of our network, where Jen and I lived, and where we all went to school. The other three lived ten minutes out of town in different directions, which was a challenge in an area that couldn’t even dream about public transit. Most of us counted down the days until we passed our G1 exits and could drive without an adult, even if we’d have to share the car with everyone in the family. Eganston didn’t even have a Tim’s, much less a movie theatre, so just being able to drive was kind of a thing.
Jen made the final turn onto Louise’s side road. The side roads had all been named when 911 came to the area, but most people over the age of thirty still referred to Louise’s sideroad as “the third” instead of Old Mill Road. The mill had been gone for a century, which made it even sillier, but that’s what happens when you have to name a bunch of roads at once.
There were only two houses on Old Mill Road, and the Jantzis owned both of them. The first was barely livable. Louise’s older brother had been slowly flipping it, but he’d gone off to Ridgetown last fall for the agriculture program, and work had slowed. The second, a sprawling three-storey red Victorian, was where the family actually lived.
Jenny Hoernig was waiting for us on the steps, and ran up once Jen had parked the car.
“Louise says that Maddie needs to stay in the car and count to one hundred before she comes up,” she said, grinning. “And Louise needs you two to carry things.”
Louise took birthday cake very seriously, and I knew that this cake in particular would be important to her. It wasn’t because it was me, exactly, but this birthday represented something. I took off my seatbelt but stayed in the front seat. I put my hands over my eyes and started counting down, because it was a countdown sort of situation. I felt safe with my friends. I felt ready.
I walked into the barn, currently empty because lambing season was over, and went to the bottom of the ladder.
“Ready or not, here I come!” I said, stepping onto the bottom rung.
“Wait!” said Louise, right on cue. “You have to tell us what you want for your birthday wish!”
I took a deep breath, inhaling the multitude of smells that made a working farm: sheep, hay, shit, rust, gasoline. We’d grown up here. This town had made us. And it deserved everything that we gave back.
“My name is Maddie Carter, and I am eighteen,” I declared. “And for my birthday, I want you guys to help me start a fire.”
FIRST WISH
Property Damage
(or: Maddie’s 17th Birthday)
1.
Maddie Carter
(One Year Earlier)
All the good stories are full of unfortunate wishes. Wishers who were clever enough to avoid all the rules-lawyering face off against wish granters who do their level best to exploit every possible loophole. It’s magic and mayhem, and depending on whether it’s a straight telling of the story or a deconstruction thereof, by the end of it, everyone has learned a lesson: wishes are dangerous.
And yet we wish. On stars, blasting through space. On coins, flipped into burbling water in the mall atrium. On loose eyelashes, which really grosses me out. And, once a year, on birthday candles.
